I Am No Longer Impressed With All You Losers.

This is the post where I talk a little about what it's like to have lived in Holland, and then to fly over to Italy for two years. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, read this.)


I think it would be an outrageous understatement to say that Lexie was a "late talker". But, she also didn't take to signing before or after she got her Cochlear Implant either, so I think it'd be accurate to say that she was a "late communicator". In fact, at five years old, it's still something we're working on. But to put it in perspective for you outsiders, when Lexie was 3-yrs-old, her teacher wrote in her end-of-the-year report that she was "nonverbal", and had only 3-4 signs that she would actually use. At 4 years, she could say a small handful of 1-2 word sentences. It's been a long, slow road.


Now, throughout this long, slow road, I would watch all my friends and neighbors raise their normal, typically-functioning children with great envy. There were a lot of things that I coveted, but the big one was speech. It was like a knife in the heart every time someone would recall something funny their two-year-old would say. A two-year-old talking?! That was totally unheard of to me. And the stuff some kids would say... it was incredibly impressive. I couldn't believe all these children had such an impressive vocabulary.

Now, it should be noted at this point that the way Lexie learns speech is completely different from how a typically-functioning child does. Lexie is only now just starting to come up with her own sentences. Up until maybe the last couple months (she is 5 1/2 now), every single word, phrase, and sentence in her repertoire is something that was specifically taught to her. She does not soak in the language around her and come up with her own words to communicate her thoughts and feelings. Her brain has been more like a computer program, where you can input certain phrases and tell it when it is appropriate to use them, but the program cannot create it's own content from the inputed information. With a child like this, the only way to help them communicate is to work nonstop every second of everyday inputing as much data into them as you can, over and over and over.


I was told, many many moons ago, that typically-functioning children (unlike most deaf children) soak up the language all around them like a sponge, but I totally forgot about this fact. So, all those years, when I would hear my friends' children say things like "I didn't poop, I just burped in my bum!" (someone's kid said this recently, I just can't remember who. But it's hilarious), I would think "WOW! That mom must be a really good parent if they've worked on speech long and hard enough that they've reached a point where that odd phrase is in their lesson plan". I mean, it took me months of hard work to get Lexie to say "I want milk". I looked at all you parents with your crazy talking children, and figured you must be working even harder than I was. And then I felt like a bad mother, like I wasn't good enough, no matter how hard I was trying. (This is something you may or may not know about moms of special needs children. We need very little encouragement to feel like we're doing a crappy job. We ought to give ourselves more credit)


And now I have a typically-functioning child. OH. MY. GOSH! It is SOOOOO freakin' easy! I had no flippin' idea! I do NOTHING, and Seth is talking up a storm. Okay, so maybe I don't do nothing. I have a lot of speech therapy techniques that are just so ingrained in me after so many years that I'm sure I still do them unconsciously. But still... I tell him "that's a giraffe" one time, and he knows the word 'giraffe'. And he can use it in his own sentence. Or sentences. Wayne and I are always cracking up over the stuff that Seth says, most of which isn't even funny, just because we didn't specifically teach him that phrase. In church on Sunday as I was passing Lexie the sacrament Seth said "There you go, Lexie, have some water", and I had a hard time keeping reverent because I laughing so hard. That's not even funny, but it's just SO different than what I'm used to. I didn't have to sit down for three weeks and repeat "have some water" over and over as I passed him a cup before he said that. He just came up with it on his own from the words and phrases he's heard around him.


I had no idea it was so easy. All those years I thought you suckers were way better moms than I was, I was so wrong! Okay, honestly, you're all probably better moms than in me in a lot of other areas, but when it comes to teaching speech, I am so totally on par.